Google Hacks

I delivered some training sessions at my school including a Google Hacks workshop. During this workshop I helped people hack Google Forms and Google Slides, and also taught them how to take control of their Gmail inbox (mine is now pretty much empty for the first time ever! Also I have color coded labels and filters and all sorts of magic making it work well for me).

Here's the presentation, Google Hacks:



On every slide it gives step by step directions for completing the different hacks. I also have linked video tutorials for every tip too.

Voice Typing in Google Docs

Super easy to use! Great for taking notes quickly...and also helps people, like me, to practise speaking slowly and not mumbling! It's not 100% accurate yet, but it will get better!

DMAIL: The email will self-destruct in 5...4...3...2...1

There's a great new Chrome extension called Dmail, which allows you to set an expiration date on emails. I believe this was probably started so that you could email sensitive material, like bank details, with a little less fear, but I can see some great ways of using this in schools too!

When you add the extension you have the option to have the email destroy itself in one hour, one day or one week. The email will not disappear from the recipients inbox (how great would that be), but instead turns into a scrambled up jumble of letters!

Firstly you could send confidential information, which you don't want there to be an email trial for, like information about an incident or confidential information about a student.

You might also want to use it for 'your snooze you lose' type emails. For example, asking if anyone is currently free or sending out a cake alert email!

You may also want to send students emails that they don't necessarily need to have access to after the lesson.

Enjoy!

Google Classroom Teacher and Student View

A quick video we made in the summer holidays. I will update it soon and will include some feedback from both my peers and students. It's funny how much you learn just by using something-this video was pretty much shot in the dark, but will hopefully give you some useful information about Google Classroom.

Google Calendar - Lesson Plans for Cover.

I'm spending my day off taking the Google Educator Exams, (I am a bit of a workaholic/weirdo). Although I use Google Apps for Education on a daily basis, I am enjoying finding out little tips and tricks through the courses. I had never thought about using Google Calendar to create and store lesson plans to provide for cover when I am absent - but it is great, and really quick and easy! The two videos provided are not too up-to-date, as one has not got the attachment feature and the second video talks about the event attachments as a Lab. The event attachments are a normal feature now, so I decided to create a short video showing you exactly how you can use Google Calendar for Lesson Plans for Cover.

Go Back in Time with Google Streetview

I thought this was a really cool feature! I'm excited to see how the area I grew up in changes, (it was full of empty warehouses and factories, and is now a commuter area full of 'luxury' flats). I think this will be great for a history or citizenship project too.

I really do need to embrace Google Maps/Earth/Streetview more. 

I intend on doing a town planning unit with students. This is for next year, so I only have a couple of ideas at the moment. I think we will watch parts of the Culture Show's Lego Episode, observing how people use Lego in town planning and we will design and print 3D buildings to arrange on a map as a class. I wan to possibly bring Minecraft and Pi into it, and I will definitely bring Google Maps into it! I guess we could look at areas they are familiar with, new build towns, garden cities, rich and poor areas, etc.

I also want to use Google Maps to get students to chart famous locations from books and historical events. I want to send them on a Google Scavenger hunt too, where they have to find my specific landmarks, but also examples of waterfalls, desserts, etc. As we are an international school I want us to pin all the places our students have lived too! We want to embrace Google Hangouts and chat with students across the world, so we can use Google Maps to research where they are from too. I also want to run a content where I give students a checklist as clues to a certain area.

How have you used Google Maps in your classroom?

Update: 
Christian Schett shared this link with me through Google+ A fantastic resource for using Google Maps in the classroom! Google are really working hard on changing their education pages, as the last time I looked it was not this beautiful or well put together!